by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Other than working overtime to re-assure the stock market, the Trump Administration is doing effectively nothing about COVID19. This is because of the metrics they are using.
Keep The Markets Happy
All Trump wants is the “German Industrialists” to be happy so they will continue to give him a pass on policy. So, in his mind, “it’s just the flu.” As such, given a lot of people die from the flu each year –as Twitter liberals keep telling me — as long as he has an effective messaging strategy and plutocrats make a lot of money then lulz. A million people could die unnecessarily and, well, that’s not really that much more than the flu, right? Trump has such a lack of the ability to comprehend any form of empathy or compassion that as long as the economy is humming and he and his shithead plutocrats are making money, the poors can fuck off.
Win Re-Election
This goes hand-in-hand with the above. He’s extremely paranoid about the evil liberals with their evil fact-base science “weaponizing” reality to “bring him down” that he, again, would rather withhold valuable information from the public in the hopes that, in effect, people will forget about it. It’s just the flu. All your old relatives died because of “the flu” so shut up and vote for me, you mouth breathing knuckle dragger. In other words, as long as the base believes it’s “just the flu” and remain locked in, then everyone else can fuck off and drop dead. Power for power’s sake. Greed for greed’s sake. Cruelty for cruelty’s sake.
Consolidate Power
And, really, if you wanted to kind of dystopian, you could say there are people like Stephen Miller who simply see the prospect of The Gray Plague as a means to an end — consolidation of power far quicker than they could ever imagine otherwise.
There are two ways to look at these metrics. One, Trump’s going to yet again evade any political consequence because the base is so afraid of the browning of America that Trump can send the whole country over the precipice and, well, lulz. And, I guess, there’s a decent chance that might work out. A lot of people — especially older people — may get sick and die, but if you can stay on message that “it’s just the flu” then lulz, no political harm no foul. It will be a more deadly edition to a string of Trump self-owns that have happened over the years. This is why Mike Pence is in control of the American response to WuFlu now. He’s a complete suck up who wants to stay on the ticket in 2020. He has every reason to prevaricate as need be to have people simply shrug this off and go back to raising their kids, paying their mortgage and, most of all, voting Trump 2020 in the fall.
And, yet, there’s another option. What if instead of simply “burning itself out,” COVID19 gets really, really, REALLY bad in the States to such an extent that the usual Trump ratfucking at last collapses? Now, Trump would see this initially as a win because he will have an excuse to get rid of Pence and maybe name Don Jr. his veep. But there are some additional problems his poor addled brain can’t comprehend because, despite Maggie Haberman’s cooing about this all the time, Trump isn’t a political genius, he’s just historically lucky.
In other words, Trump may finally meet his political match if, well, America is brought to its knees on a level not seen since the Civil War. A number of things might happen if Trump strictly follows the metrics I laid out above. The 20% of the infected who get REALLY REALLY REALLY sick may reach such a high percentage of the American population that, well, the economy locks up because no one is well enough to go to work. The health care system locks up and collapses. Even then, however, Trump would probably blame liberals, or MS-13 or whatever the fuck that idiot can come up with. And the base, thinking Trump is Jesus H. Christ himself who is the only person who can stop the general historic tend towards a minority-majority America, will abide by it.
But there are two things Trump can’t control — the WuFlop and The Gray Plague.
The WuFlop
This is the rather dramatic — and eerie — event when someone who seems healthy abruptly faceplants and, sometimes, begins to writhe uncontrollably on the ground like they have a xenomorph in them about to pop out. It wouldn’t take too many recorded instances of this happening around the United States in the next two weeks for, well, there to be some political consequences for House Trump. Each time I’ve seen the WuFlop videos on Twitter, I’ve gasped. Initially, of course, these videos wouldn’t be show on TV. But if enough WuFlops happened, there would come a point where they WOULD show up on TV. That would cause a panic and we would, at last, realize that Trump has not clothes and he’s lead us all into a very dark situation with no ready solution in the near term.
The Gray Plague
If thing get as bad as I fear, then a whole lot of elderly people are going to die. A whole lot. A huge amount. A shocking amount. And a lot of powerful people are elderly. Of course, Trump would at first see this as a win because if a dozen powerful elderly center-Left people died rather abruptly, then he gets to consolidate power faster. But, “death be not proud,” so a lot of elderly center-RIGHT figures could die, too. If things got bad enough, Trump, at last, might have finally met his match because it will rather abruptly dawn on everyone that it was directly because of his obsession with owning libs that an obscene number of Americans died for no damn reason.
Before you get too excited, we have to think about Trump’s reaction to this. He’s probably going to snap. He’s probably going to, in a panic, shut down the Internet, order passenger planes be shot out of the sky, suspend the Constitution and declare martial law. The question, of course, is what the reaction would be, in practical terms to all of this. I find it doubtful that the US Military would follow any of these crazy orders, but the MAGA base WOULD likely begin to hunt down and murder “libtards”– like ME! — like members of a Cultural Revolution group. I know that sounds rather panicky and hysterical — maybe I have Trump Derailment Disorder — but the we won’t know until that time comes, now will we? We’ve never had a POTUS go bonkers and so, I guess, anything is possible.
